A couple of posts back, I wrote about a summer camp I used to run for the children of my parish in Doncaster. This has led me to mull over some issues of health and safety, safeguarding and political correctness which have emerged since 1984 when I was doing the camp. Political correctness is probably the most moaned about and vilified corner of our social lives. We all despise the 'nanny state' and local 'jobsworths', but we find it impossible to counteract these trends. Why should this be? After all, looking after children and keeping people safe at work are good things, aren't they?
Part of the answer, I believe, is to do with our modern public mindset. This is the mindset of secularism and the exclusion of God from public conversation. There are three main ways in which the secularist mindset tends to travel in the direction of regulation, the direction of aversion to risk, and the direction of a culture of suspicion and blame. This is not to say that atheist or secularist philosophy is the direct cause of these trends or tendencies in modern culture. I don't think that you can point the finger at any one political party, or group or ideology. We are all to blame.
No. The case I want to make out is that the absence of God from social consideration, the lack of experience of going to church, the conduct of an inner life without reference to God, all these salient features of a secularist mind set, inevitably push the personal and social features of our culture towards these restrictions that so annoy us.
Now, all this is a pretty big claim. First of all, let's have a look at the culture of suspicion and mistrust. Now, if you don't believe in God, then 'man is the measure of all things'. All that we do, all that we plan for, all that we determine is solely that product of our human capabilities. Nature is beyond our control, and we make allowance for that. But everything else is the product of human effort. Now this is fine if we live in a pleasant world where everyone is nice to one another, and there is no conflict. But that is not the sort of world we live in.
There is no way in which can we assume that a stranger will do what we want them to do. We have excluded trust from our mental world. The religious person is used to trusting God and trusting in God. By and large that trust will have been seen to be beneficial, otherwise they would cease to be religious. Trust is an essential part of any religious person's make up. If a person is not used to trusting on this everyday basis, as part of his or her mental furniture, then it is very difficult to trust anyone at all. Out of this there is no defence against a culture of suspicion. Instead of trust there is the never-ending quest for certainty, for some kind of guarantee. So we have our CRB checks, our safeguarding training and our background surveys. All this encourages us to retreat further and further into our own closed worlds.
But this is not just a generalised trust. Because the secularist does not believe in God, he or she will not go to church. One of the main things that you do when you go to church is to meet people. But even in purely human terms, this is a peculiar form of meeting people. It is a radically egalitarian form of meeting people. Most of our interactions, at work, shopping, travelling either attempt to exclude the world, or they are conducted on a hierarchical basis. At work there is a definite hierarchy, and that hierarchy determines the whole way people get on with one another. The same is true in commercial transactions.
In church, no one has to be there. All sorts of people are there. Conversations spring up spontaneously. Sometimes you will take to this new person talking to you, sometimes you will want to get away from them. All is done civilly, and it is all on a regular basis. This is fantastic training in how to get on with other people, and how to trust them. There are very few arenas where this is able to happen. If a person is not used to this free and easy form of egalitarian conversation, then it is easy, once again, to retreat into suspicion and mistrust. The direction of travel remains the same.
Now we come to blame and aversion to risk. Even though the secularist comes out of a position of suspicion and mistrust, things still have to get done, you still have to co-operate with people. But this isn't all. Because God isn't in your world, everything is down to human agency. People are responsible for everything. If something goes wrong, then someone is to blame. As I write, there is an investigation being carried out as to why a polar bear was able to break into a camp and attack five young lads, killing one of them. Now, of course, such a serious accident deserves investigation, but this investigation is the first thing that has to be done.
The party hasn’t come home yet. The injured are still in hospital, the funeral hasn’t taken place. No! Someone must be to blame! In less than twenty four hours since the tragedy, we have already heard that the trip wire failed to work. Well, it’s cold up there. Perhaps something froze. Polar bears are cunning, purposeful killers. It’s what they do, and they are really sneaky. Perhaps the leaders were outwitted. The outcry will inevitably come that it is all too dangerous. Let’s stop these adventure camps.
Our secular mindset refuses to acknowledge that we live in a fallen world, and that we are fallen. Things go wrong. We fail. We fail because we are limited – limited in intelligence, limited in energy, limited in understanding, limited in time, limited in neighbourliness. We have a blind faith in progress – that things must get better all the time, but because we are alienated from God we think we can do everything ourselves. Perhaps we can do most things ourselves, but even if we are able to do most things, we need to do things together. But here is the rub – can we trust one another? We have to co-operate, but we cannot trust.
And so out of all this we have the passion for regulation. We can do things together if we all go by the rule book. Step beyond the rules, and you are in big trouble
The irony of all this is that atheists and secularists used to rail and chafe at the customs and traditions of the Church and religious observance. They used to (and still do) laugh at the social and communal protocols and etiquettes, courtesies and manners that characterise religious assemblies, get-togethers and ‘do’s. And yet it is these very secularists and atheists that hamstring our common life with all the dead weight of legislation, regulation and interference.
Secularists have been so keen to castigate faith in God and the role of the church in community, that they have become blind to the dangers of their own mindset. (I don’t call it a philosophy because, the secularists are keen to separate themselves from any over-arching philosophy. They believe, quite literally, in nothing.) Their aversion of God has pushed them into the primordial realms of fear, mistrust and subservience, from which, without God, there is no escape.
And yet it was one of the most outwardly religious of our Prime Ministers, Mr Blair who has been foremost in pushing this culture of political correctness and distrust of the common person bringing in over 3,000 new laws (ninety percent of which are completely petty and pathetic and definitely come under the PC/H&S umbrella!) in his term of office -plus another few hundred from Gordon Brown in his short stint.
ReplyDeleteIt may be related to a form of religion - a friend of mine calls it moralistic fundamentalism/terrorism .... this sort of attitude of black and white, with no shade of grey and an Irish comedian referred to the old way of doing this as this: In Ireland the police and the people would work on these levels a. That's Grand (meaning you are not trespassing on any law at all) b. Your pushing it there a bit (meaning you are breaking a law but there is space for a common sense reaction, nobody is going to get that upset) and c. Now you are taking the piss (meaning the full weight of the law is going to come down on you as you justly deserve).
It is people abiding by the letter, but with an intrasigent moral fundamentalist approach, rather than the spirit of the law that starts to develop the problem. It is people and institutions like Ofsted that will give an excellent rating because all the correct forms and procedures have been followed and filled in --- without bothering to see whether anyone is actually helping a child and/or stopping its family from beating it to death. Meanwhile giving a poor rating to an institution that in fact delivers an excellent service on the ground, but doesn't waste time form-filling. It is all the wrong way around.
It is people not concerned with protecting others but concerned with protecting their own back, their own career progress and themselves from being sued so that they can fall back on the old "I followed all the correct procedures" mantra.... It is the sacking of a railway man for taking off a trolley from the line as a train was approaching because he didn't fill out a form in triplicate first!
I don't think religion or the lack of it is really the problem - it is simply a refusal to allow common sense and decency to dictate and it is an insistence that the law will be followed in black and white, that fining people is the way forward. That money is the sole punishment. It is valuing all that is junky and junking all that has value!